In searching for information, a date related to that information is often a vital part of a search query. For example, a search may be executed for all transactions on a given date, or within a given range of dates. Similarly, a search may be executed for all information entered on a given date, or within a range of dates. Such searches may be useful for identifying sales of products, meetings with clients, visits by people to a facility, and many other similar forms of data. Another example of such searches for information occurs on the website of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, at which, a date or range of dates may be entered for patents or patent applications in the process of searching for such data.
When a user uses software to search for data with a date range, typically the user needs to provide a start and end date for a date range. Where a very specific date range is specified, or a date range unrelated to a calendar is specified, such an interface works well. However, even in such instances, errors in entering dates (such as typographical errors on a keyboard) can be problematic, both in terms of providing erroneous results of searches and in terms of reliance on such erroneous results by users of such data. Users of data need not be the people entering the search criteria, and may not have any contact with the users of a data storage system from which data is obtained. Thus, date range errors can affect many more people than the users of the interface to the data storage system.
It may be expected that most date ranges will correspond to a well-identified portion of a calendar. Quarterly sales information may be based on a three month window. Weekly hospital visit counts may be based on a Sunday to Saturday (or Monday to Sunday, for example) week. Monthly sales call totals may be based on calendar months. All of these exemplify potential types of searches for information, or queries in database operations. However, it can be difficult to enter a proper start and end date for some of these requests. For example, a mistyped begin date may result in a quarter with four (instead of three) months. Similarly, a mistyped end date may result in a Monday to Monday (instead of Sunday) week. Thus, a solution to avoid entering specific dates for a date range may be useful, to ameliorate errors and to ease requirements of user interfaces in software.